Yesterday my wife and I visited the Valley Mall, the Hagerstown area’s premiere shopping center. While there I noticed FYE, a leading specialty retailer of entertainment and pop culture merchandise in the United States, was having a huge sale on all their clearance items. We swung through the store looking for some deals.
It turned out to be a waste of time. No deals were to be found. We walked the entire store. You know what we could not find? Anything on clearance. FYE announced all their clearance merchandise was 50% off, but they failed to put anything on clearance.
Sale and clearance are not the same
We saw some stuff that was on sale, but none of it was marked clearance. That meant none of it was 50% off. As far as deceptive advertising goes, I thought this was major. It’s the kind of consumer fraud one would expect to see at a used car dealership.
Since malls are dying and FYE stores exist solely in malls, the specialty retailer doesn’t have a long-time future. Not really. Personally, it makes me sad to think about malls going to extinct. If the death of malls means retailers like FYE will cease to exist, perhaps some good will come out of it.
